There's a very revealing insight into (past?) BBC thinking in a Guardian article from early this month (h/t Klingon at Biased BBC), especially in the light of this week's report on the Rotherham grooming scandal.
It came in the course of an interview with Yorkshire-based award-winning writer, director and producer Kay Mellor (best known for Band of Gold):
One of her regrets, she says, is a drama she wrote about Asian men grooming and sexually abusing underage white girls (“I was watching it unfold”). But a changing of the executive guard at BBC1 in 2008 meant it never got made. “I don’t think people believed it. One very senior person said to me ‘this does not go on’.”
Isn't that an extraordinary thing for a senior BBC executive to have said? For those of us who have studied BBC bias for some time, it's sadly unsurprising though.
Wonder who that 'very senior person' was?
2008 saw the arrival of Ben Stephenson as Controller of Drama Commissioning for BBC TV - the same Ben Stephenson who caused something of a stir by saying of BBC commissioning, “We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.” Was it him?
I bet no BBC executive ever said that about certain Spooks plots, or White Girl. It might have been Stephenson, but my money is on the new (in 2008) BBC 1 Controller, Jay Hunt.
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